Managing Blog Comments

Blogs come with their own set of problems. You can expect to have to deal with comment spam, Trackback spam and trolls.

Spam and Trolls

Sadly, blogs aren't free of the universal Internet malady: spam. On blogs, spam takes the form of commercial messages in your comments and Trackback links, and offensive rants from posters called trolls.

Spam comments accumulate when spammers send scripts out to find and post to blogs. Typical subjects include online gambling, mortgage offers and pharmaceutical products. You may also find more unsavory spam as well. For the spammers, the idea isn't to put their ads in front of your readers; the idea is to create links to their websites thereby boosting their rankings in search engine results. Since the link is the point, you may also find spam that tries to trick you with a comment like "Nice site." Popular blogs can get hit with hundreds, even thousands, of spam comments in a single day.

Trackbacks are a blog technology that allows another blogger to create a link on your blog to theirs automatically when they write a post that refers to yours. It's intended to be a reader service that allows blog readers to work their way along the path of related posts. Sadly, they are just as susceptible to abuse as comments are. Spammers create a fake Trackback link for the benefit of links to their Web sites and to the detriment of the value of your blog.

Trolls, unlike comment and Trackback spammers, are real people with real things to say. They are called trolls because what they have to say is usually unpleasant, even vicious. They lurk on your blog, reaching out to take a swipe at you as you go about the business of posting. A troll may post a comment that targets you with a personal attack or simply a rant on a subject they are hyperfocused on. They aren’t sending out commercial messages, but their comments are usually just as off-topic and usually offensive as well.

Preventing Spam

Every blog must have a front line defense against spam and, thankfully, there are some very good tools that let technology be that defense. Akismet is a popular plug-in for Wordpress, for example, that analyzes comments and learns which comments to prevent from hitting the site.

Another popular form of technology that will help in the battle against spam is called CAPTCHA. It's a requirement that a user submitting a comment first decipher an image of some text elements in the image. People can read them, but computers can't, so this prevents a computer script from adding comments to a site.

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